"In the past months Sony has been confronted with everything from a foundering TV business to a massive tax charge that together have pushed its expected loss for financial year 2011 to a record $6.4 billion. Today, Sony has gathered the press at its head office in Minato ward, Tokyo, so that recently-appointed CEO Kazuo Hirai can explain how he plans to turn the newly reorganized 'One Sony' around." I know, I rip on Sony a lot for squandering MiniDisc, but when push comes to shove I'd rather the company change its ways (when it comes to DRM and other anti-consumer practices) and become competitive than go under entirely. Maybe this new CEO gets it - however, since there's no word on the things that make Sony suck, I highly doubt it.

Disagree about the phones. I had an xperia X10. It launched in the US with android 1.6 when 2.2 was standard. It died relatively quickly, and so did the warranted replacement. Maybe the newer ones are better? The xperia Play looked good. If they had promoted that a little better I think they could have had a real successful phone and a great income stream from game sales as well.

The upgrade to ICS will be made available to 2011 Xperia phones over the next few months. But it won't be an OTA upgrade, requiring a connection to a PC.

And various Sony blog posts are warning people to not expect wonders from the upgrade due to heavier RAM usage; the 2011 Xperia phones only have ~380 MB of RAM available to Android/user-apps. And the ICS upgrade won't include a new kernel; it'll still be the 2.6.3x-whatever kernel from Android 2.3.x.

So it's a choice between older OS with lots of RAM available to apps, or newer OS with less RAM available to apps but nicer features.

Will be interesting to see how CM 7.2 and 9.0 compare to the stock ROMs.

The 2012 Xperia phones (I believe) all come with 1 GB of RAM, meaning there's ~872 MB available to Android/user-apps.

the 2011 Xperia phones only have ~380 MB of RAM available to Android/user-apps

I'm not sure what you mean by that, but I have noticed that the default Gingerbread RAM monitor hides the RAM usage of some software, mostly the base OS and some bundled applications (like the web browser), leaving only ~300-350MB of visible RAM, so I guess that this is what you are talking about. But from that point of view, with a barely tweaked stock ROM, I already have less than 380MB of RAM available. I wish sony would just say something along the lines of "the base ICS install typically eats up * MB RAM more than the base GB install ?"

Still, with the typical RAM usage of desktop OSs and applications* in mind, I would tend to think that 512MB of RAM would be enough for a phone OS where it is highly uncommon to run two RAM-hungry softs simultaneously. I could see problems for people who already push the hardware to its limit on Gingerbread with one single piece of software that would normally require a hardware upgrade, but not otherwise.

* Desktop windows not included. I highly doubt that people who work on cellphone software would screw up on RAM usage optimization as badly as Microsoft.

2011 Xperia phones ship with 512 MB of RAM in the SoC. However, approx 128 MB is reserved for the GPU, and 64 MB reserved for the modem, camera, and other hardware. Leaving only around 340 MB or so for the OS and apps.

The X10 looked great on paper ... but the build quality just wasn't there. Crappy plastic, weak screens, weak SoC and other internal hardware. And they weren't upgraded very quickly.

The only good thing is that they were very hackable, with all kinds of custom kernels and ROMs available.

The 2011 Xperia phones are much higher quality than the previous Xperia phones. Although the tsunami that hit Japan impacted their development due to parts shortages. And they haven't been upgraded very quickly. But they're still fairly hackable, with a Sony-supported method to unlock the bootloader (that, unfortunately can be prevented by the carriers, like stupid Fido up here).

The 2012 Xperia phones are supposed to be even better. The SoCs are a bit behind the times, but everything else is very nice. Will be interesting to see just how hackable they are.

A huge amount of possible Sony sales is declined because of stock issues. The problem is not demand for it's products but Sony's ability to supply the products they lists.
For a long time after the tsunami you had real trouble finding a Sony camera mid-high end camera and just about most of it's other products.
Now you have issues with demand for it's receivers, photo LCD ect., home audio products, you name it.
Part of this loss stems from that disaster i think, not demand. Whatever techies say about Sony DRM ect.. Ordinary people out there love Sony.
Sony has these wonderful price lists. When you see it you actually realise how large and ecompassing Sony is. But getting those products is another issue.

As you said, Thom, the act of not addressing their anti-consumer and DRM practices (not that I would expect them to) fails to sway my opinion of Sony. With actions like rootkits (yeah, I know that was a long time ago), Blu-ray protection schemes that can deprecate Blu-ray players after barely any time at all, and removing features after purchase that were used to sell the platform (that one seriously pissed me off), Sony consistently treats its customers as if they're dormant criminals just waiting for an excuse. You know what? I'm not a criminal, and I don't appreciate being treated like one.